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If we only had a phone...
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August 24, 1998 by David Rohde |
From...
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(IDG) -- If you or your company's employees are having trouble getting all the local phone lines you need, take a moment to shed a sympathetic tear for Harold and Evelyn Chamberlain of Hendersonville, N.C.
Hendersonville is a small, resort-oriented community in the hills of western North Carolina. On a recent vacation visit there, I read in the local paper about the plight of Harold and Evelyn Chamberlain. They moved to Hendersonville on July 16 and as of this writing still don't have a phone line to their home.
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The Chamberlains are in their 70s and suffer medical problems. In addition, Evelyn's father is 93 and lives alone in Virginia. "I need to check on him all the time," Evelyn told the Hendersonville Times-News. "But I can't call him now."
BellSouth actually gave the Chamberlains their phone number three weeks before they moved, but the phones didn't work when they moved in and they still don't. When the local paper inquired, BellSouth said, "Well, whaddya know. All the cables in the Chamberlains' area are used up. We'll have to go there and install some new trunks."
Corporate telecom managers will recognize this as the dreaded "special construction" exception regularly rolled out by local exchange carriers. If you ask for an ISDN or, heaven forbid, a digital subscriber line (DSL) that's more than a hop, skip and a jump from the central office, you may have to pony up hundreds of dollars to help the giant carrier install the lines or equipment. But the Chamberlains weren't asking for ISDN or DSL or Synchronous Optical Network (SONET). They weren't looking for a second or third line for Internet access, a fax machine or a gabby teenager. This wasn't even their vacation home. This was their basic analog phone line. Right now, if they have to make a phone call, they go downtown and find a pay phone.
What's ironic here is that BellSouth is probably the biggest bellyacher to the regulators when it comes to the issue of universal service. Because only the Bells have a true commitment to serve customers in out-of-the-way areas, they claim, the government had better not take away the subsidies largely passed through to business users that make remote service possible.
Even worse, BellSouth has been one of the carriers most active in backing ridiculously transparent "grass-roots" coalitions that are pawns for their lobbying positions. My favorite has always been "Keep America Connected!" - a front group whose position is that people all over the country will lose communications if the Federal Communications Commission introduces unsubsidized competition nationwide. Gee, maybe Harold and Evelyn Chamberlain would have to a wait a year for a phone line rather than a few weeks if it weren't for groups like that!
The regulators are all located in the highly profitable metropolitan cocoon of Washington, D.C. So what they don't get to hear is the fact that all carriers - new or old, dominant or otherwise - make investment decisions based on whether there's enough of a critical mass to serve an area.
If you're asking, "What's wrong with that?" I might say, "Nothing at all." But the Bells can't have it both ways. If they keep getting a per-minute tribute on both ends of every long-distance phone call - and keep asking for it on every dial-up Internet connection - they'd better put that money to good use.